Monthly Archives: June 2008

NY food and fun highlights

This would all have been relayed as it happened, if only I had brought my laptop. Since I didn’t, the New York highlights continue after the fact, this time related to food and fun: Tribeca Grill, which is co-owned by actor Robert de Niro. The building itself is in a historic 1905 warehouse, with exposed [...]

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More NY highlights

Taking notes during a conference is a great way to remind yourself of the speakers you heard and the insights you gained. Otherwise, I find one presentation tends to blur into another and it’s the standout performance (Seth Godin springs to mind) that you remember. Looking over my notes, I can tell you there were [...]

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Sue’s excellent NY adventure

The IABC International Conference in New York City was great! I got back Wednesday evening but have been scrambling ever since to catch up – I didn’t bring my laptop and couldn’t log in using my roomie’s (forgot my password). I’m up against deadlines and Son #2 had his grade 12 prom Thursday night. Some [...]

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Not just a scary voice

Stephen King’s books used to be on my reading list; early in my working career, I read The Shining on the train from the suburbs into the city. I would get on the train and start reading, and suddenly I would look up, eyes wide and heart pounding, and the train had arrived. But after [...]

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A dog day of summer

Today is Take Your Dog to Work Day, as I learned from the Mental Floss e-newsletter. Launched in 1999, the day celebrates “the great companions dogs make” and encourages adoption from humane societies, animal shelter and breed rescue clubs. We didn’t adopt Jake, our resident dog, from the local shelter. We did visit the shelter, [...]

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Dads get less love?

According to an article in Sunday’s Toronto Star, Father’s Day seems “like an afterthought” compared to Mother’s Day. Writer Sara Barmak says, “Despite the concerted efforts of greeting-card makers everywhere, compared with the emotional behemoth that is Mother’s Day, the more recently invented holiday celebrating our dads still doesn’t carry the same symbolic weight.” She [...]

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The mission today

Really, I’m working away here, but I just had to stop and share this. A client invited me to sit in on a conference call, with the intent of writing an article for the employee newsletter. Before the call, the fellows we’d be talking to took the time to write up a draft article. I’m [...]

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3 flies walk into a bar

What a great exercise in telling a story and setting a mood, in a tight framework too! I’m talking about the Copyblogger‘s Twitter Writing Contest. The goal: Write a story in exactly 140 characters (the length of a post on Twitter, aka a tweet). Not more, not less; exactly. The contest is over now, after [...]

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Ya gotta laugh

There’s something so appealing about humour, I don’t know why people feel the need to be stuffy. A posting on MyRagan led me to Woot, an online store and community that sells “cool stuff cheap.” One look at the job postings shows you this crew has a great sense of humour: “It’s not all sell, [...]

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Brain food

Talk about a deft turn of phrase! There’s an interesting article in today’s Toronto Star called “Patient gets brain surgery – fully awake,” by Joseph Hall. Besides being a fascinating account of the surgery, the reporter uses great description like this: “Glioma, as it is also known, is a whack-a-mole cancer, with tumours that are [...]

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